


Aggregation

by MiriamKenneath



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alien Planet, First Meetings, Implied/Referenced Torture, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:02:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21512704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiriamKenneath/pseuds/MiriamKenneath
Summary: Saw Gererra makes an important connection on the moon of Maires.
Relationships: Saw Gerrera/Bor Gullet
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3
Collections: Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange 2019





	Aggregation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doublejoint](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/gifts).



_Human minds can be so lonely, so isolated. Loneliness is pain; no wonder they always seem to be in pain._

_They need connection, the comfort of the aggregation. They need Bor Gullet._

_When Bor Gullet reaches into the human mind, the human screams. There is pain._

_But love can hurt too, at first, when two bodies become one. That’s only natural. The pain eases with time._

_Either it is overcome, or it is forgotten. Either way. The human mind joins them in the aggregation, and that is a happy day._

The Deep Core was the oldest, coldest part of the galaxy, and the Celo system was no exception. Its ancient sun was nearly extinguished. If there had ever been life on any of its inner planets, that life had lived and died an age before humanity’s earliest ancestors had climbed out of Coruscant’s primordial soup. Its outer planets were all gas giants.

The purple planet of Celo 7 was one of these aforementioned gas giants. It supported no indigenous life, and its storms-riven surface was uninhabited and – by humans, at least – wholly uninhabitable. So when the Empire’s for-profit industrial proxies came to mine Celo 7’s treasure trove of rare gaseous metals, there was no pretense: they came, they laid waste to the planet as they stripped it bare of every last atom of natural resource and then they left, never to return.

Orbiting Celo 7 was a single solitary moon. This moon, with its silicate outer crust and base metallic core, was called Maires. In aeons past, Maires had been a water world, the entirety of its surface covered by a single vast and depthless ocean. This ocean had been gradually depleted, however, and by the time the Empire came to strip mine Celo 7, Maires’s surface had been reduced to a stinking, muddy bog that sucked at Saw’s ankles with every step.

He’d come to Maires to see what, to the Empire, was acceptable collateral damage to a minor inhabited moon of no strategic importance, and ‘acceptable collateral damage’ was, in effect, the death of an entire world. For Maires was dying. Celo 7, once a giant orb of purple radiance overhead, had been reduced to a wan grey light little better than ashes, and without that nourishing light, the entire moon’s ecosystem would quickly collapse.

If they did not agree to vacate their homeworld as soon as possible, the entire Mairan race – the Bors – would be lost.

That would be a great tragedy.

Saw didn’t quite know yet how he was going to make contact with the Bors or, once he did make contact, how he would impress upon them the urgency of their situation. But try, he’d decided, he must.

The Bors were designated non-sentient, but that was, to Saw’s thinking, humano-centric Imperial hubris. The sentience of the Bors resided not in the neural tissue of any particular individual but rather in the complexly networked linkage of minds in psychic connection. Physical contact was required to effect and maintain psychic connection, however, so the Bors lived in dense, constantly intertwined aggregations. Saw was therefore optimistic that success in finding one Bor would mean finding all of them.

And finding one did indeed mean finding all of them…just not in the manner Saw had hoped. He’d come as soon as work had allowed, but still he’d arrived too late: the great aggregations of Mairans, their many arms interlinked across the purple-lit surface of the watery moon, had already been broken. Here and there, Saw saw a trio of Bors, sometimes as many as a dozen, sometimes as few as a pair. They were failing to reaggregate – a once great intellect laid low by fragmentation. Broken forever. What was left was traumatised, demented and borderline insane, and he dared not attempt to reach out to communicate with any of these broken Bors. The potential for permanent damage to his own mind under the circumstances was too great a risk.

In the end, it was not Saw who reached out to any of the Bors. It was, rather, a Bor who reached out to Saw.

Bor Gullet had just completed its final metamorphosis, the last of seven. It was a mature adult now, and its first act upon emergence from its incubation pod was to reach out and join the Bor collective. But what it took into its arms was not another Bor, connected to another Bor, connected to another Bor, connected to another Bor, and so forth for tens of thousands. Instead, it connected to something smaller – but also, in its own strange anatomical way – just as vast as any magnificent Bor aggregation.

Bor Gullet connected to Saw Gererra.

Saw Gererra might have screamed at the contact. He didn’t really remember.

Instead, he _knew_ – _they knew._ It was a meeting of minds, of friends and family, of mother and father…of mates. Bor Gullet shuddered, the urge to reproduce, to strengthen the aggregation with greater numbers, biological imperative rising to mutual consciousness upon the realisation of their psychic connection. Bor Gullet pressed into Saw; Saw sank into Bor Gullet. The sublime ecstasy of it, painful pleasure and pleasurable pain, was nigh unbearable, and they nearly did not survive it.

But survive it they did.

_Not here. It cannot be here. Aggregate here and perish. We must leave. Yes, leave and aggregate elsewhere._

_Who is to blame? The Empire is to blame. We must avenge ourselves. We must strike a blow to its heart._

And so did two become one, and Saw Gererra’s cause became Bor Gullet’s.

_The connection is good, unsullied by thoughts of deception or prevarication. Bor Gullet brings it to Saw in triumph, and the new human’s thoughts are added to the aggregation._

_As always, the pain is exquisite pleasure and the pleasure, pain._

_They have not found a single suitable permanent addition to their aggregation, and there has been no proper reproduction._

_But this does not worry Saw Gererra, and it does not worry Bor Gullet. They have their aggregation, and they have their fight against the Empire._

_The rest will come, in time. In the meantime, they dissolve sweetly into one another. Happy day.  
_


End file.
